Close but distant neighbors

Except for the dwindling band of us old-timers, there are few who associate Leontief with Schumpeter. Yet, in many ways, they were a pair. Schumpeter welcomed Leontief to the Harvard faculty in the mid-1930s and continued to respect and even envy Leontief's talents and accomplishments until his death in 1950. Their lives had a lot in common. Both were cultivated European intellectuals, wiry and compact in physical stature, who appreciated Russian caviar, French champagne, ballet, opera and well-informed cultural discussions on topics beyond the range of interest of the average American economist then, or now. Leontief taught the first-year graduate theory course; Schumpeter taught the second. Each had an office of modest size in Littauer Center, headquarters of the Harvard Department of Economics. They walked home across the Cambridge Common to their spacious clapboard houses in Cambridge, less than a block apart. Some twenty years after Schumpeter died Leontief settled into a summer residence in Lakeville, Connecticut, the next town to Taconic, where th Schumpeters had had their country retreat. When the Leontiefs decided to be buried in Connecticut, they approached the caretaker of the local cemetery. He steered them, unwittingly, to the area where “another economist” (guess who?) was buried. Thus Leontief and Schumpeter remain neighbors to this day.

Leontief focused on the interdependencies of the real growth process, though these were often obscured by the jagged contours of observed economic time series.